With the holidays right around the corner, most of us are filled with the spirit and cheer this time of year brings. So of course, scammers have found yet another way to dampen the mood—and AI is helping them do it.
If you’re like most Americans, you’re skipping the long lines this Black Friday and shopping online. And if you’re budget savvy, you’re navigating through dozens of deals to find the very best prices for the items on your loved ones’ holiday gift lists.
Though the mainstays like Amazon and Target are always a go-to for Black Friday sales, folks are using new and exciting methods to compare pricing and purchase gifts. For example, you can now search most popular search engines using just an image—allowing you to quickly compare deals on the same item across sites and choose the best Black Friday pricing for your purchase. Another shopping innovation is made possible by the virtual assistant in your pocket—AI chatbots like ChatGPT, Grok, and Claude.
I’m a ChatGPT fan, both for business queries and personal assistance. If you are, too, you might already be figuring out how the tool can help make your holiday shopping easier.
Many folks are now using AI chatbots to find their perfect products, compare pricing, and take them right to the best deals. I’d bet that we’ll see a spike in shopping related ChatGPT queries over the holiday season, up from the estimated 2.2-9% of all of the platform's searches that involve online shopping. That doesn’t even account for other AI agents, like Grok and Claude, who are growing in popularity just ahead of the 2025 holiday retail boom.
The problem is, your AI assistant is highly motivated to help you complete your online shopping. So much so that those AI “hallucinations” you hear about may cloud the chatbot’s ability to help you sniff out scams.
Take, for example, this enlightening blog post from Jennifer Gilligan over at Integra, a fellow MSP. She’s an expert in cybersecurity, and even she got duped by a fake site selling a travel bag, as suggested by ChatGPT. Turns out, her chatbot assistant wanted to share the best possible deal with her—even though it knew all along that the site was probably fake.
Thankfully, Jennifer was able to get her money back—but the 10% (and growing!) of Americans who have lost money to an online scam were less fortunate!
While our usual blog content is all law firms, all the time, you can feel free to save and send this one to your friends and family. Because today, we’re covering a type of cyber risk that skyrockets this holiday season: the online scam.
Whether you’re using AI or not, scammers are—and these common traps are likely going to be at an all time high this holiday season.
Save your hard-earned cash for holiday gifts, not online grifts. Here’s what you need to know—these tips will help you keep your shopping on the up and up and your bank account safe from scammers.
I saw this image going around the internet—it shows a fake scam email sent from “Microsoft.” A closer look at the sender’s URL, or web address, shows that the email actually came from “R-N-icrosoft,” a duped URL that looked almost identical to the real thing.
Though this scam, and the domain associated, are actually several years old, it seems as if the same scammer is still profiting off of “typosquatting,” a type of scam involving a faux URL that’s just close enough to pass for the real thing.
In the online shopping world, this could present as:
Always check the link with a keen eye to search for misspellings, fake redirects, and spoofed domains—otherwise, you may be handing your card number over to scammers. No one wants to deal with chargebacks, financial losses, and cancelled cards in the final weeks of holiday prep!
I’m shopping for my two daughters this holiday season, both of whom are now young adults. Needless to say, gone are the days of buying American Girl Dolls and their accessories. The new gifts—the likes of which could include Apple devices and travel tickets—carry a much larger price tag.
Like any parent, I want to make the most of our gifting budget, and scoring great deals helps us deliver even more holiday magic for our loved ones. But, if you find a really unbelievable deal? Don’t believe it. It’s probably a sale or discount scam.
Scammers go about these sale scams several ways. Here are a few common outcomes, and be sure to click the links to each to see a (sometimes quite funny!) example:
It’s easy to laugh at these sometimes silly mix-ups, especially when you’ve only lost a few dollars or can get your money back. But, these scams aren’t unique to disreputable online retailers or low-cost items. You could spend quite a bit of cash on electronics, high-end accessories, or rare collectibles only to find yourself at the other end of a scam.
Though it’s nice to see folks making the best of a bad situation, it’s not so funny when you think about how many online shoppers are being taken advantage of. Protect yourself and try to resist a too-good-to-be-true deal—because in all honesty, it is probably a fake.
Most people today are users of social media sites, like TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook. Personally, I find myself scrolling through my feeds at least once or twice a day. Every so often, a social media ad or promotional video catches my eye... but before you take advantage of scroll-stopping deals and discounts, take a second look! We’re in an epidemic of fakes—fake products, fake businesses, fake discounts, and more.
According to the Better Business Bureau, several of these social media-based fake-out scams have already been reported by online shoppers and gift-givers, including:
This scam features folks purporting to share exclusive discount codes and gift cards to websites like Sony, Apple, Jared Jewelers, or other pricey retailers. They’re looking for revenge for being “fired,” and are now giving away top secret discount codes for no cost across TikTok and Instagram. All you have to do is “click the link in their bio”... which takes you to a spoofed website, where you’ll enter your card info and the discount code, only to find that scammers have taken your cash and are now burning through your bank account or credit line.
Truth be told, there probably is no “super secret discount code” for any major retailer—any discounts provided are individually generated and often tied to an employee’s ID number, which is deactivated when employees are let go. If you see this scam, just keep scrolling, and report it to the platform for good measure.
Be wary of sellers offering handmade gifts for a few reasons.
First of all, the BBB reports that folks are being led away from reputable retailers like Etsy by item descriptions promising a discount for ordering off-platform, from a seller’s direct website. Often, these landing pages collect your payment info and leave you with nothing but a compromised card and no gift in hand.
Another issue with handmade gifts is their authenticity. Scammers often steal photos from actual independent artists, creating new listings for “handmade” pieces and vanishing them away with no refund or paper trail. In the event that you do receive anything at all, it’s probably a knock-off that was mass-produced in a factory, and is likely far lower quality than the original.
Don’t ever go off of the original platform to purchase a handmade item, and be sure to verify that the listing is created by the actual creator of the item—you can typically cross-reference on social media or the creator’s own website to make sure that the listing is coming from a legitimate associated URL.
I can’t say I know much about those little monster toys hanging from handbags these days, but many buyers of the popular Labubu toy have reported receiving what they call “Lafufus”-- a play on the words “fake Labubu.”
Often purchased secondhand or from shady retailers and sketchy social media shopping listings, these toys somewhat resemble the originals, but are far lower in quality and have distorted features that very clearly mark them as a fake. Not only will the kiddos be disappointed, but your wallet will, too—these toys cost upwards of $50-85 from the original retailer, PopMart, and that’s not the kind of money you want to waste on a fake! Ironically, most of these listings don’t offer returns... that is, if they’re even still traceable after the holiday season.
Popular discount retailers like Shein and Temu, both of which are clothing and household goods mass manufacturers, often follow a similar pattern as the “handmade” scammers listed above. They skim photos from legitimate clothing websites—including a rash of small businesses—and the actual item that gets delivered is a low-quality counterfeit that barely matches the image at all.
You can avoid these counterfeiting scams with a simple reverse image search—if you see the same listing photos at a higher price point elsewhere, or in a listing accompanied by more photos, that’s a quick giveaway that the listing is a fraud.
As much as you and I may be using AI to purchase gifts this holiday season, scammers are also leveraging this technology to profit from unsuspecting buyers.
Scammers are AI-generating images that don’t match the final product (if it even exists!), creating website codes and workflows to quickly set up scam sites that skim your payment information, and even generating fake customer service emails to clean up typos and seamlessly translate their messages across languages into convincing, professional emails targeting shoppers around the globe. They’re even using deepfake technology to create fake customer and celebrity reviews and advertisements of their products!
If you’re planning to leverage AI in your holiday shopping, be sure to check your list twice, much like a certain holiday figure is known to do... otherwise, the only person receiving a gift from you is a scammer in wait. ChatGPT can be a help for the holidays, but your due diligence is needed to properly leverage it as a tool.
Oh, and if you’re already waiting for a legitimate package, go ahead and ignore those delivery scam texts, too.